A Revisit of Agribusiness Education by an Original Critic

When asked to present this paper, I wondered whether I should put on sack cloth and ashes and repent. The tag of "original critic" comes from my position in a 1987 debate with Lynn Robbins. The debate was arranged by Bruce Beattie for the Western Agricultural Economics Association annual meeting and was prompted by the White House conference, "Developing Tomorrow's Agribusiness Leaders," held about three months before. Lynn and I differed, but our subsequent articles seem to mute the differences, maybe because of postdebate revisions. Our articles preceded the Lincoln Report by about a year. At the time of the debate, the United States was coming out of a farm crisis. In some ways, we are there again. At this point in time, there is less pessimism and unrest among farmers. More importantly for us, colleges of agriculture have not experienced the same precipitous drop in enrollment, and that gives us less discomfort. What has happened to the "critic," and what are my views now? The theses in my 1988 article are (a) agribusiness as a program or as a discipline is not well differentiated from agricultural economics and (b) our forte is applied economics, not management. I will strongly defend the former and might waffle slightly on the latter. I was never an outright opponent of the agribusiness movement. I just do not see business administration as the city on the hill that some saw and still see.